Search

Background: There is a growing evidence base for the importance of spatial reasoning for the development of mathematics. However, the extent to which this translates into practice is unknown. Aims: We aimed to understand practitioners' perspectives on their understanding of spatial reasoning, the extent to which they recognize and implement spatial activities in their practice, and the barriers and opportunities to support spatial reasoning in the practice setting. Sample: Study 1 (questionnaire) included 94 participants and Study 2 (focus groups) consisted of nine participants. Participants were educational practitioners working with children from birth to 7 years. Methods: The study was mixed methods and included a questionnaire (Study 1) and a series of focus groups (Study 2). Results: We found that whilst practitioners engage in a variety of activities that support spatial reasoning, most practitioners reported little confidence in their understanding of what spatial reasoning is. Conclusion: Informative and accessible resources are needed to broaden understanding of the definition of spatial reasoning and to outline opportunities to support spatial reasoning.

Pattern is fundamental to mathematical learning yet pattern has been conspicuously low key within early mathematics curriculum guidance in England despite evidence that it predicts later attainment in mathematics overall. Whilst recent curriculum changes have seen pattern afforded enhanced status, this is within a conception of pattern that marks a significant shift away from the evidence base. Through analysis of 25 years of early mathematics curriculum in England, this article identifies a curriculum landscape where pattern has been afforded little attention and narrowly framed. It finds that positioning pattern as a minor topic in mathematics potentially limits children's access to "powerful knowledge", in a critical realist sense, and to learning which is fundamental to deep, connected mathematical understanding. Recognition of pattern as powerful knowledge would position it as an essential, broad, central tenet of early childhood mathematics education and as an entitlement at the heart of national curricula.

Research shows that attention to pattern and structure is fundamental to mathematical learning and attainment yet early mathematics curricula in England underplay the importance of patterning. In a critical realist notion of powerful knowledge, pattern teaching has the potential to empower children to notice patterns, mathematise their everyday experiences and engage in mathematical sense-making. This study investigated how to harness this potential. It reports on participatory research with ten teachers of three to five-year-old children in England as they developed pattern teaching in their classrooms. Findings indicate that teacher knowledge, pedagogic interactions and pattern-rich environments (all underpinned by an appropriate developmental progression and extended to form a setting-wide shared approach) support the development of patterning praxis in early childhood classrooms. These offer potential priorities for ECE teachers in developing their patterning praxis in order to support children's mathematical learning.

Alongside new models for government-funded professional development, England's academisation policy has significantly changed access, provision and responsibilities for teacher learning. This article reviews this impact on professional learning in primary mathematics, pointing to increased variability for teachers in the development they experience, increased responsibility for many school-based subject leaders and disrupted flow of professional knowledge around the school system. The article concludes by predicting the challenges for teacher learning in mathematics if a full academisation policy agenda is pursued.

The importance of children's perspectives is now well-established and there has been much attention afforded to appropriate methods for listening to children within the research. Whilst language-based research methods, such as interview, remain commonplace, children's representations are increasingly included as data in educational research. Photographs, drawings and tours have been used alongside the traditional tools of observation and interview to illuminate children's understanding of their school experiences but more are needed. This paper reports on an addition to this repertoire of tools, small world toys, and finds that valuable insight can be gained through using them as a data collection method. Drawing on research into children's lived experiences of school, it outlines the affordances and key principles of this method. It argues that capturing the "process" as well as the "outcome" is key in using small world toy representations and that using them in collaboration with other methods is needed in order to gain rich, reliable data. It concludes that whilst ethical praxis is key in using any method to research children's perspectives, crafting new and bespoke methods to more authentically hear and take account of children's perspectives should be an important and ongoing endeavour of researchers in this field.

Dialogic teaching has enormous potential to harness the power of talk in developing children's thinking but is sometimes challenging to enact within today's policy context. Similarly, sustained shared thinking is an established and powerful practice with children in the early years but faces pressure within today's educational climate. Though closely related, the two have been addressed largely separately until now. The authors argue for drawing dialogic teaching and sustained shared thinking together more explicitly by reviewing how they are similar yet distinctive, and by offering a continuum model for practice, throughout school, which takes a dialogic stance. They suggest that this more holistic approach may empower teachers to utilise these powerful forms of pedagogy. Establishing a continuum within which sustained shared thinking and the many pedagogies of dialogic teaching align may strengthen both perspectives in the face of outside pressures and help to clarify the position of productive dialogue throughout the curriculum.

Within the wealth of research on 'ability' in education, there is a missing perspective: the perspective of the child. Whilst 'ability' informed practices such as 'ability' grouping are commonplace in the UK, how these are experienced by the young child has previously received only limited attention in research. Using case study evidence, this article demonstrates that children's lived experiences of 'ability' are highly individual and shaped by a broader range of social, structural and pedagogic aspects of classroom life than previously thought. Implications are that a wide range of teaching choices can potentially affect a child's experience of 'ability' and that the impact of these are particularly profound for some children, shaping their perceptions of themselves and others. Children's perspectives therefore offer a challenge to the hegemonic discourse of 'ability' in education and the classroom practices upon which it is based.